Reduze VHD size

Hi together

How of you tried to reduze the size of a VHD/VHDX file? Did you tried the usual way within the Hyper-V console and was amazed that no option for this task is available?

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Per default there is no “shrink”. If you search in the internet you’ll find a lot articles how to extend the disk or you’ll find references to a tool which is no more available in the net or is only for VHD not for VHDX files.

The trick is easy. You’ve to use the Disk Management first.
Within the Disk Management attache the virtual disk you wish to reduce. Noteworthy, the disk may not be in use!

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After this you can extend or in our case reduce the partitions as usual:

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At the end of the process we’ve not allocated space. To reduce the disk size with the Hyper-V console, you’ve to detach the VHD:

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Within Hyper-V we take the same steps as above but we’ll see, there is a new option to shrink the virtual disk now:

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I know, this task is not really for productive environments. I think everyone of us who operates with an own test- or demo-environment had issues with the storage capacity and wanted to reduze the disk size which was generous calculated in the history.

Good luck :-)